Joao was still struggling with the joint and then dropped all of the dagga on to the floor. Joao was taken aback as Kevin got down on to his hands and knees, and began to lick the palm of his hand to pick up as much of the dagga as possible. Joao and Viv had four cats living inside the flat and the thought of smoking the fallen dope disgusted him. Joao threw Kevin the bag of dagga, ‘Fuck that, here’s more. That shit will be full of cat hair.’ Kevin looked at him strangely and said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like being an addict and not having!’

As they shared the cat-hair joint, their conversation moved on. Joao was adamant that there was a price to be paid for the pictures we took. This was something we hardly ever discussed. Kevin was having none of it and he was getting annoyed: ‘Retribution? In order to have retribution there has to be a sin!’ ‘There has to be retribution for the things we sometimes do!’ Joao persisted. ‘Are you saying what we do is a sin?’ Kevin asked.

Joao could not answer, but he felt that there had to be some form of retribution for watching people kill each other through our viewfinders when all we did was take pictures.

That night was the first time that Kevin had admitted to having an addiction to buttons and needing, not just choosing, drugs. Button-smokers crush a Mandrax tablet, a banned tranquillizer, and then mix it with dagga before stuffing it into a broken-off bottle neck. This so-called white pipe produces a powerful rush, often causing the smoker to keel over, before sinking into a couple of hours of sedated calm. Mandrax is not an elegant drug; button-kops (button-heads) share a communal spittoon into which they slobber, spit up phlegm and sometimes vomit.

Kevin was, however, paradoxically affected by Madrax. Instead of the usual mellow downer most people experienced, he got a jolt of energy. He would become all fired up with ideas and emotions. That was one of the reasons why Joao and I never realized the extent of his addiction-I always assumed that he could not be doing buttons when he was so hyper. One day in 1993, Joao went around to Kevin’s place. He knocked on the door for a while, but no one answered. He could hear loud music, so he knew that Kevin had to be in. Kevin finally opened the door and Joao was shocked to see that he was bleeding profusely from a cut above his eye. Kevin told him how he had been in Alexandra township and had gone down on one knee to take pictures when a young comrade had come running past and kicked him in the face. The hard edges of the camera had cut him above the eyebrow.

Joao followed Kevin to the backyard where he found a friend of Kevin’s, Reedwaan, holding a white pipe, and struggling to keep his balance. Joao grew a little suspicious - the wound seemed fresh and he could see that Kevin and Reedwaan were swaying all over the place. They offered Joao a bust on the pipe; he refused and left. Years later Joao found a roll of black-and-white film of pictures of Kevin in his backyard posing with boxing gloves and the blood from a cut above his eye running down the bridge of his nose. When we asked Reedwaan, he admitted that the story Kevin had told Joao and the rest of us about the Alex incident had been concocted. Kevin had cut himself by falling into a rosebush in the yard after he had bust a pipe and the rush hit him. Most button-smokers sit down while smoking and let themselves keel over when the drug takes effect, but Kevin would inexplicably stand up and then fall over. This habit irritated Reedwaan because it interfered with his own high - he always had to keep an eye on Kevin. On a couple of occasions Kevin had nearly gone over a balcony while rushing.

By late 1992, Kevin was fast approaching burn-out and we all were pretty strung out. He eased off covering the violence and took up being a late-night disc-jockey part-time. If I was awake at midnight, I would listen to him. He had a good radio voice - warm and rich; sometimes he would say something to us over the air between songs. While he did not leave news-photography altogether, he joined us on fewer dawn patrols - hardly surprising since his radio show ended at five in the morning. Ken had also eased off on the morning cruising, leaving Joao and me to do it alone much of the time. Ken’s life was pretty taken up with his work in the photo department at The Star, and his marriage to Monica was an intense, claustrophobic affair that naturally excluded the rest of us. But he would sometimes tell us stories of times when their emotions went way over the edge. On one occasion, Ken was on his way to shoot a boxing match in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, an hour-and-a-half drive from Johannesburg. Monica called him and said she wanted him back, I forget the details of why, but she told him that she was going to start tearing up his pictures one by one until he got back. Ken knew she was capable of it and immediately turned around and returned home. In another much-told Ken and Monica incident: they were having a fight that became nasty. In a rage, Monica began to burn a pile of cash that was in a fruit bowl in the dining-room. Ken had been saving up for an expensive leather jacket and there was a lot of money in the bowl. Crazy as it was of Monica to burn the banknotes, I found it even stranger that Ken apparently made no attempt to stop her. We heard other stories in a similar vein, of broken plates and record collections. Their fights became legendary and whenever they invited any of us over for dinner or a birthday party we never quite knew how the evening would end.

Kevin’s love life was just as bizarre as Ken’s. He had a thing for a fellow journalist who, though attracted to him, did not want to have a relationship with him. But she liked having him around and while she would not allow him to sleep with her, they would hold hands, kiss, that kind of stuff - the romance without the sex. He was beside himself; the more she played him, the harder he threw himself at her. I was friendly with both of them, but she was of course making his life hell. Joao and Viv, on the other hand, were a stable, loving couple whose only problem was that Viv felt herself being kept at a distance because Joao would rarely discuss the details of what had happened to him during the day. But she preferred it that way - she would have worried far more had she heard the gory details of the township war every day.

We were all doing well professionally. We were good at covering conflict. Many other photographers had covered the violent aspects of the South African story, but most of them didn’t last very long, or they kept at an arm’s length from the violence. It was possible to cover the news without getting so close that you risked being burnt. There were notable exceptions, and none more than two great black photographers who had been taking pictures for years before I was born. Peter Magubane, 30 years my senior, began as a driver for the internationally famous black South African magazine Drum, moved on to being a darkroom technician and, with characteristic tenacity, became a photographer for Drum in 1954. In those days photographers had to hide and sneak to get photographs showing the birth of apartheid, exciting but dangerous times. During its heyday in the 50s, Drum magazine photographers would dress up as labourers and smuggle themselves on to white farms and into mines to get pictures of the appalling conditions under which blacks worked. Peter did his share of exposing brutal white farmers, leading to his first arrest in 1963. When he asked why, the arresting white policeman told him, ‘You know why you are detained.’ He spent 586 days in solitary confinement without ever being charged for a crime. When he was released, the state placed a five-year banning order on him. The ban meant he was unable to take pictures, but Peter was a fighter and he joined the (now-defunct) Rand Daily Mail and continued working. He was arrested and sentenced to a further 123 days for contravening the banning order. During the student uprising of 1976, his nose was fractured by the police. Peter thrived on the challenge. His courage was rewarded: in 1980 he was offered a contract by Time Magazine. The conflict was to affect him personally: in 1992 his son, Charles, was killed in political violence. As he put it, in an interview soon afterwards, ‘Violence is not exclusive and it has claimed many victims at random. My son was hacked and shot in the head like an animal.’

Alf Khumalo was another legendary photographer and a great teller of stories. His favourite memories were of covering the classic boxing match, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, in Zaïre between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. Ali befriended Alf and he would go visit the boxer in the US. Joao, Kevin and Ken, who at different times all worked with Alf at The Star, were a regular audience for his anecdotes, especially during the late shift. While I occasionally had the chance to listen to his favourite stories, they had the bonus of Alf digging into his photo cubicle to show them a negative. Alf would open the door and a pile of negatives and prints would simply slide out from the cubicle, jam-packed with a life’s work. But Alf could always find the picture.

Both Alf and Magubane had photographed the Mandelas before Nelson went to jail and they were close to Winnie in the struggle years. They were both still working when Mandela was released after 27 years in jail. At press conferences, Mandela would leave the podium and come over to shake Alf’s hand, chatting fondly to the black photographer with his ancient Nikons and a sports jacket that always refused to match his tie, shirt or trousers. Foreign photographers would click away and ask us, ‘Who is that?’ and we would laugh and say, ‘That’s Alf.’

The June 16 Soweto uprising of 1976 saw the emergence of another generation of photographers. One was Sam Nzima, who took what was possibly the most famous South African picture of all time - the broken body of a schoolboy, Hector Petersen, being carried by a weeping classmate after he had been shot by police. The child was bundled into a reporter’s Volkswagen Beetle and taken to hospital, but it was too late; Hector Petersen became immortalized as the first to die in the children’s revolt against the state. Sam Nzima’s picture was sold and resold thousands of times by the newspaper group that owned The Star (Nzima had worked for the World, banned for its coverage of the 1976 uprising and now defunct), but he never saw a cent until more than 20 years afterwards when he was finally granted the copyright. For Sam the stress of work and the exploitation of his images were too much: he left journalism and became a store-owner in a homeland, helping a relief agency’s feeding scheme.

After the Soweto uprising, another generation of politically motivated news-photographers joined the Magubanes and Khumalos, but they were mostly white. The brief period of black renaissance in the 50s that had allowed the potential of black South Africans to blossom as novelists, poets and photographers was inexorably crushed by apartheid. Photo-journalists like Paul Weinberg, Omar Badsha, Gideon Mendel, Giselle Wulfsohn, Guy Tillum and others came to the fore photographing the Struggle. They learnt much from the old-timers: Paul Weinberg never forgot being in Leandra township in 1986 when Magubane saved a family besieged by a mob who were out to kill them. By the time the Hostel War happened, this group had mostly eased off covering the violence after years of struggling with the system and the restrictions imposed during the various States of Emergency that made news so difficult to cover.

Black photographers had the language and cultural skills and contacts in black communities that allowed them greater insight and access, unlike the whites, who hardly ever understood even one of the nine major black languages. But black photo-journalists were much more prone to harassment by the police - no white photographer was ever detained for 18 months in solitary as Magubane had been. Despite the price he paid for his success, as well as the loss of his son in the violence, he never resented those who achieved acclaim more easily, even if they were white. When Joao won the Ilford Award in 1992, Magubane celebrated by simply picking up Joao and the heavy trophy in his arms like a baby.

In the post-apartheid era that followed Mandela’s release, black journalists continued to have it tougher than their white counterparts. The Emergency Regulations restricting the press, pass laws restricting the movement of blacks and detention without trail for political offences were a thing of the past; but the partial tribalization of the Hostel War made working in conflicting zones like walking a tightrope for black journalists. While everyone was vulnerable to the violence, we as whites were exempt from tribal identification. The tribalism of Inkatha and the Zulu-dominated hostels made it very difficult for non-Zulu black journalists to work there safely. But the danger was not restricted to hostels alone.

We found this out the hard way, in 1993, when on an assignment with Weekly Mail journalists, one of them the effervescent and dreadlocked Bafana Khumalo, in Bekkersdal township, about 80 kilometres west of Johannesburg. Zulus who had fled the war in Thokoza had settled in a section of Bekkersdal, and Inkatha soon launched a branch there. That immediately sparked fighting in that previously peaceful township. We were in Mandela Park, a shanty town on the outskirts of Bekkersdal that was inhabited exclusively by Xhosa ANC supporters. One the edge of the shanty town, we came across a group of armed Xhosa warriors. They told us they were going to ‘the mountain’. We were puzzled, as the area was flat, without even a hill to be seen. We followed the group until they led us to a raised mound - just a few feet high. It was the clearing they used for ritual purposes and they called it the mountain in memory of their hilly home territory. Dozens of men and boys had gathered, singing a melancholy war-song as they walked in a slow circle around the clearing. It sent chills down my spine.

We were very excited. We had heard about the ceremonies in which warriors readied for battle, where they received magic potions from specialist sangomas, but had never before seen one. The protective potion was called intelezi and we had often seen the power of people’s belief in its ability to make them invulnerable to bullets or harm. Each sangoma has his own recipe for intelezi, but it must contain human parts, preferably from an enemy killed in battle. The braver the fallen fighter, the more powerful the magic potion. Warriors doused in it were fearless in war.

The light was perfect, the sun slipping partially behind clouds as it sank quickly to the horizon. The warriors passed by the sangoma one by one, allowing him to apply a dark paste to their faces. They ignored us as we encroached closer and closer. I was getting anxious - the light was nearly gone and I felt that my photographs were failing to capture the essence of the ritual. The warriors went around again, this time to be sprayed with a foul-smelling liquid from a bucket. After several more minutes taking photographs, we paused at the edge of the mound, excitedly discussing how privileged we were to see the ritual. But we were also well aware that none of us had shot the perfect picture, despite the great light on this remarkable scene. During the process, we had become separated from Bafana. He was a former advertising copywriter (one of his gems was ‘I’m too smooth and creamy to be a margarine’) who had only recently started covering news, and who had moved to journalism because of the Struggle. He had become hooked on the adrenaline: he loved being in the middle of the conflict, watching history being made. If the news editor mentioned the word ‘story’ Bafana would be there, notebook at the ready, anticipating the chance to go out and cover the violence. With such an attitude, he should have been a photographer.

While we were taking pictures, Bafana had been confronted by some of the comrades who were born in the township. There were two distinct groups at ‘the mountain’ preparing for battle. There were rural Xhosas who were taking part in the intelezi ceremony and didn’t give a damn if we were there or not; and there were township-born comrades. The latter were living in the squatter camp because overcrowding in the township meant they could not get a brick house to live in and rent charged on the preferable backyard shacks was too expensive for these - mostly unemployed - people to afford. They were archetypal members of the ‘lost generation,’ caught between the system and the Struggle, having neither education, jobs nor a future beyond angrily hitting back at a repressive state that seemed too powerful to be hurt. These comrades accused Bafana of using their blood to make a living. Two ANC officials were trying to convince these angry young men that the press had a right to be there, sticking to the official position that freedom of the press was guaranteed; but the coms were having none of it.

Bafana had been born in Soweto, but his name and ethnicity were Zulu, and rather than talking his way out of trouble, he was getting in deeper. The Zulu he spoke was rich and formal - proper Zulu, not the abbreviated township version. He had never learnt to speak Xhosa properly; the two Nguni languages of Xhosa and Zulu are mutually understandable and usually it would not have been an issue, but on that afternoon as the Xhosa-speakers prepared for battle against Zulus, it was a potentially fatal distinction. His dreadlocks, earring and fashionable clothes established a class difference between him and the shanty-town residents. They had little enthusiasm for journalists in smart cars who would arrive at their worst moments carrying expensive equipment. We would witness their misery before leaving again with a record of suffering that we would use to make a good living. They did not want us there, they hated us - but it was Bafana they turned on. They were comfortable in threatening Bafana - he was accessible, culturally and linguistically. Bafana understood that they knew that if they killed him, the police would not try to hard to find them: ‘One more dead nigger won’t make much difference among all the deaths’, whereas whites were royal game. Blacks had, for centuries, absorbed the hard lesson that to harm whites was to invite massive repercussions. For once, Bafana was an outsider. He had always felt that in being a participant in the Struggle, he was a member of embattled communities everywhere, and that he was an honorary member of that squatter community too. They began to accuse him of being a member of Inkatha. That he was black and pro-ANC was not the point, he was an outsider, and they were now labelling him as an impimpi - justification for his pending execution. Bafana was about to become the classic victim of mob justice, of the necklace.

Suddenly Kevin looked up from where he was chatting with Joao and me on the far side of the clearing and cried out, ‘Bafana’s in trouble!’ He had caught sight of the body language of Bafana and the men around him. We rushed to the alley between shacks where a petrified Bafana was being led away by a group of men. Kevin grabbed Bafana by the wrist and began pulling him away, as we talked and cajoled, trying to convince the Xhosas that Bafana, though his name was Zulu, was in no way an Inkatha member; that he was an ANC supporter, a comrade. The men’s faces were sullen, filled with hatred, but they let us get Bafana away from them and to the cars. If Kevin had not noticed what was happening, they would have been out of sight a few seconds later. Bafana would have been dead by the time we had finished photographing the ceremony.

When Bafana got back to the office, he wrote a powerful story on what he had seen and then swore off covering violence, conflict or hard news. This was to be his last news piece. He began covering the arts world, as far from the bang-bang as he could get. Bafana had been a true adrenaline junkie, but on that afternoon in Bekkersdal, he saw the logical conclusion of it all: we were living on the violence, feeding off it, and there was only one way it could end.